Red to the touch
by Nevertheend127
Summary: Everything she touches turns to red, and Steve is too good to have Natasha's bloody fingerprints.


Everything she touches turns to red.

Natalya Romanova was born a perfect porcelain doll.

They tell her later that she was chosen for three reasons- she only learns two during her time in the Red Room.

One- her classic, universal beauty. The 'fire' that took her parents would have killed her too, she's told. "You're pretty." offer many of her overseers and teachers, and the comment is often followed with a stinging slap over her mouth. "That will save your life one day. It has before."

Beauty is a deadly vice, Natasha learns, and she's never seen it as anything more than a weapon.

By the time she's made her first kill, she learns the second reason.

"There's fire in your blood." Whispers her pale-haired friend, a slight girl named Marta who shares her bunk. "That's what I heard them say. They say you'll burn everything you touch."

There's a sparring match three weeks later, and Natasha and Marta are pegged against each other. Natasha kills her only friend, and wins in turn a promise that she'll survive one more night.

"Natalia and Marta- you are next."

The fight is short and sad. Girls like Marta don't have a chance- better to end it here and now, a painless and merciful death at the hands of a friend instead of brutal dismemberment.

That doesn't excuse how natural this feels, how easy it is to wrench the girl into a chokehold.

Lips parted, heart pulsing, waiting for the command to fall from her instructer's lips. A death sentence for the little china doll sobbing within her grasp.

"Finish her."

Natasha does, every time without fail.

It's efficient and silent. Her victims never even have time to feel the pain.

But Natasha does feel it.

She evolves and adapts to every test, and she watches her reflection change. A china doll morphs into something ugly and wretched but decietfully beautiful; all shadowed skin and viper's eyes, a dead-girl walking.

The only time she ever really feels alive is when she has splintered bones beneath her fingers and the taste of her own blood coating her teeth.

"If the world was for the weak, men would be made of glass." It's like a mantra, a saying everyone in the Red Room knows.

After her Graduation, Natasha is out on the field. The world is everything she knew it would be; sex and money and violence.

It scares her a little (and nothing ever does,) how easy life is after that. The rest of the world is more like the Red Room than anyone realizes.

An endless cycle of fire and beauty and blood.

She she trades in her flowy blue dress for black kevlar, and she learns to kill on command.

Until.

"Now why are all the pretty girls hommicidal?" Are Clint's first words to her. She tries to put a metal bar through his skull, but he forgives her for that later.

Although it does come up in arguments, like when they're bickering over who gets what assignment or when she wants to name his kids.

She finds safety in S.H.I.E.L.D, or as close as someone like her can get. All the luxery, the quiet benevolence of the organization amazes her.

She adaps, like always.

Barton is her best friend from there on out, and when Natasha becomes part of the Avengers she grows to love her team.

They're a cesspool of testosterone and pointless arguments, she realizes. But she loves them, and it's an unfamiliar feeling. Heat that prickles at her insides, rushes through her chest, making her giddy and giggly- they're morons, but they're perfect.

And Steve.

Well.

There's some dark, greedy part of Natasha that wants him. And it's not wrong of her to want, but it would be inarguably wrong of her to take.

Banner seems like a good idea, with that in mind. With everything that's happened to him, Bruce is just as screwed up as her, just as jaded and woefully damaged. She can't hurt him, because Bruce understands what it is to not have any control. To be beaten down and forced to surrender by this deep, cloying part of himself he doesn't like to acknowledge.

Honestly, how much damage could she do?

And Natasha adores him, she does. He's goofy and nerdy and incapacitating amounts of good humor and fun.

But in the end, he's not who she wants and she has no idea what to do with herself.

The red in her ledger is seeping through to the surface, and she doesn't know whether or not Steve knows about everything she's done.

"You okay, Nat?" He asks, in that damningly genuine voice he has, and Natasha'd head snaps up to meet his smile.

"Fine." She shrugs. "Just thinking."

He nods, like he knows what she's thinking, even though it's very unlikely he does.

"We'll find him, Natasha. Don't worry." Then he gives her this sad, sweet little smile and she realizes that he knows what this is like. He's spent ages searching for Bucky, and she's never seen his hopes falter once.

Because that's what Steve is. Goodwill and hope.

And it's because of exactly who and what Natasha is that she can never have him- best she can do is keep his trust, his friendship, do her best to keep him safe.

Natasha never got out of the Red Room, not really. An endless cycle of fire and beauty and blood, and Natasha can't help but hope, just a little, that the cycle ends with him.


End file.
